Organisms
pharyngula | April 14, 2014
That photo is from a lovely new documentary, with this trailer.
However, I have to call attention to one troubling fact.
“All these lemurs have one thing in common – from the little one to the very largest one – they all have female dominance. The females are the leaders. The females are the ones that make the choices of where they go and what foods they eat and where they’re going to sit,” says Dr. Wright.
We must immediately call for an MRA boycott.
pharyngula | April 7, 2014
Say goodbye to another mammal being sacrificed on the altar of 'traditional medicine' -- pangolin scales are consumed as medicine, their blood is used in tonics, their embryos are swallowed as aphrodisiacs, and they're just generally eaten up. They're also incredibly fragile, and cannot be farmed; they're all caught in the wild and they usually die of shock.
I have no sympathy at all for traditional Asian medicines. It's all bogus sympathetic magic that leads to the slaughter of animals worldwide for absurd reasons.
pharyngula | March 21, 2014 Perth Scuba
In case you're wondering how anything could be this gaudy and survive, it couples the color to a nasty toxin saturating its flesh. "Eat me and die," it's saying.
pharyngula | March 17, 2014All the biologists out there know about the heath hen: it's probably the number one most common example of a recent extinction discussed in considerable detail, because it illustrates so well that extinction is a product of so many factors, from habitat loss to inbreeding to predation to competition to climate shifts to you name it. The last bird died in 1932.
But now, something amazing has been unearthed: a 40-minute movie of the heath hens in their final reserve on Martha's Vineyard, made in 1918. There's a two-minute clip at the link. Watch the last dance of the heath hen and feel the…
pharyngula | March 10, 2014 HHMI
The image shows approximately 16 choanocyte chambers, each about 30 micrometers in diameter—about the size of a pollen grain. The green color marks the flagella—hair-like structures that pump the water. The red color marks the cytoskeleton, which includes a structure called the collar (not visible here) that captures the prey. The light-blue regions mark the nuclei of individual choanocytes.
pharyngula | February 21, 2014
The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a new exhibit, Tentacles. It is about…I think you can guess what it's about. Can I find an excuse to visit California in mid-April?
